2009 World SeriesWelcome to Britannica’s coverage of Major League Baseball’s World Series. For last year’s feature, see our 2008 World Series article.

The 2009 Major League Baseball season offered few of the dramatic pennant races that typically arise at the end of the year. In the last few weeks of the regular season, only the American League (AL) Central, National League (NL) West, and NL Wild Card races were yet to be decided. In the AL Central, the Minnesota Twins won 16 of their last 20 games to catch the Detroit Tigers and force a one-game tiebreaker after the close of the regular season, which the Twins won in 12 innings. The Colorado Rockies, transformed by a managerial change after the team’s abysmal start, made a late challenge to the Los Angeles Dodgers, who held a solid lead in the NL West for most of the season but played only mediocre ball after the All-Star break. In the end the Rockies had to settle for the NL Wild Card, edging out the Atlanta Braves. In the AL East the perennial powerhouse New York Yankees returned to the postseason after a one-season drought, and the rival Boston Red Sox qualified as the AL Wild Card. Both teams from the greater Los Angeles area—the Dodgers and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim—won their divisions (the NL West and the AL West, respectively), and the defending champion Philadelphia Phillies and the surprising St. Louis Cardinals each handily won the other two NL divisional races.

While 2009 mostly lacked the game-by-game drama of past seasons, the year did, however, see a number of significant individual accomplishments take place. In June Randy Johnson of the San Francisco Giants became the 24th pitcher in major league history to surpass the 300-win mark. Johnson’s accomplishment was eclipsed by an even rarer feat in July when Chicago White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle threw the 18th recorded perfect game (all 27 opposing batters retired without reaching a base). Two long-standing hit milestones were surpassed in 2009: the Seattle Mariners’ Ichiro Suzuki recorded the 3,086th hit of his professional career (in both Japan and the United States), a record for a Japanese player, and Derek Jeter became the all-time hits leader of the storied Yankees franchise. The player who had arguably the most impressive 2009 season, Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals, became the first player in major league history to hit at least 30 home runs in each of his first nine seasons.